Category

Research

Snorkel AI emerged from a research project, and we remain closely connected to the research community. Students and professors associated with the Snorkel project continue to publish academic papers that push the field forward, and the Snorkel AI research team integrates the most promising of those ideas into our platform.

Our picks

Image for Getting better performance from foundation models (with less data)
Getting better performance from foundation models (with less data)
Getting better performance from foundation models (with less data)
August 4, 2023
Fred Sala
Image for Snorkel AI researchers present 18 papers at NeurIPS 2023
Snorkel AI researchers present 18 papers at NeurIPS 2023
The Snorkel AI team will present 18 research papers and talks at the 2023 Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) conference from December 10-16. The Snorkel papers cover a broad range of topics including fairness, semi-supervised learning, large language models (LLMs), and domain-specific models. Snorkel AI is proud of its roots in the research community and endeavors to remain at the forefront
October 31, 2023
Team Snorkel
Image for Long context models in the enterprise: benchmarks and beyond
Long context models in the enterprise: benchmarks and beyond
Snorkel researchers devised a new way to evaluate long context models and address their “lost-in-the-middle” challenges with mediod voting.
June 6, 2024
Amanda Dsouza

All articles on Research

Image
Why Frontier Agents Fail Real Engineering Work: Two Terminal-Bench 3.0 Task Deep Dives
Terminal-Bench 3.0 (formerly Frontier-Bench) recently launched, built to track what AI agents can and can’t do across real computer work. Terminal-Bench 2.1 has been saturating, with top agents reaching 84%; on Terminal-Bench 3.0, the best model, Claude Opus 5, achieves just 43.5%. Terminal-Bench 3.0 raises the bar with 74 authentic, verifiable tasks across 7 domains, designed to expose meaningful gaps
August 20, 2026
Derek Pham
,
Srikar Kodati
Image
Claude Opus 5: Performance and Error Analysis on Frontier Coding Tasks
Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5 recently debuted as the second model overall on the current Senior SWE-bench leaderboard, behind Fable 5. It also achieves the highest score of any evaluated model on the benchmark’s Bug & Performance Investigation category, reinforcing the rapid progress frontier coding models continue to make on increasingly realistic software engineering tasks. Just as notable, Opus 5 reaches
July 27, 2026
Ankit Aich
Image
Inside Frontier-Bench: two Snorkel-built tasks that frontier agents still can’t crack
Frontier-Bench launched this week – the successor to Terminal-Bench, built to track what AI agents can and can’t do across real computer work. Terminal-Bench 2.1 has been saturating, with top agents clearing 75-84%; on Frontier-Bench’s launch set of 74 tasks across 7 domains, the best mode Opus 5 achieving 43.3%. Snorkel AI contributed as a task author and data partner,
July 23, 2026
Derek Pham
,
Srikar Kodati
Stylized illustration of a glowing neural network hub rising above a grid of abstract city blocks, representing an AI agent operating inside a structured enterprise environment.
Enterprise environments and training AI agents for real-world workflows
Most agent benchmarks still evaluate a thin slice of the job. The agent receives a task, produces an answer, gets scored, and the episode ends. Enterprise workflows work differently. An underwriting agent may need to read policy documents, inspect customer records, call internal tools, ask a simulated user for missing information, update state, and follow approval rules. A correct final
July 23, 2026
Chris Glaze
,
Ramya Ramakrishnan
,
Joe Licata
Image
Milestone-Based Evaluation and Training for Long-Horizon AI Agents
Long-horizon agents operate across many dependent states and transitions, often spanning multiple tools, environments, and periods of external feedback. The difficulty comes from preserving coherent progress as earlier decisions constrain later actions. A single workflow may involve researching evidence, changing files or records, waiting for external responses, revising plans, validating intermediate results, and returning to earlier systems with new information.
July 9, 2026
Zhengyang (Jason) Qi
Image
Agents’ Last Exam: AI Benchmarking for Real Work
At our latest Snorkel AI Reading Group, Yiyou Sun and David (Xinyang) Han (UC Berkeley, Center for Responsible and Decentralized Intelligence) presented Agents’ Last Exam (ALE) — a benchmark designed to evaluate AI agents on long-horizon, economically valuable, real-world tasks with verifiable outcomes. ALE is a collaboration between Berkeley RDI, Snorkel AI, and 300+ expert contributors across 55 professional subfields. ALE asks a deceptively simple question: can
June 29, 2026
Snorkel Team
alex-ratner-talk
Agentic AI Evaluation: Closing the Gap with Better Benchmarks and Data
Alex Ratner, co-founder and CEO of Snorkel AI, spoke at @Scale: Systems & Reliability about one of the most underappreciated problems in AI deployment: our ability to measure agents has been outpaced — arguably for the first time in the history of the field — by our ability to build them. The talk digs into what it actually takes to
June 22, 2026
Snorkel Team
Image
Benchtalks #3: We taught AI everything except how to learn
For our third Benchtalks, the series dedicated to the researchers building the measurement toolkits that frontier labs hill-climb on, Snorkel AI co-founder Vincent Sunn Chen sat down with Parth Asawa, a PhD student at UC Berkeley advised by Matei Zaharia and Joey Gonzalez. Parth leads research on continual learning and is the creator of Continual Learning Bench, developed in collaboration
June 20, 2026
Vincent Sunn Chen
continual-learning-image
Continual learning and evaluating how AI agents learn across sequences of tasks
Most agent benchmarks evaluate each task as an independent episode. The agent receives a task, produces an answer, gets scored, and moves on. The next task starts as if the previous one never happened. That setup misses a core requirement for deployed agents. A coding agent, research assistant, data analyst, or workplace assistant should improve as it works across repeated
June 18, 2026
Chris Glaze
Image
Cua-Bench: benchmarking computer-use agents on professional software
TL;DR We built a benchmark of 25 expert-authored KiCad schematic-editing tasks and ran a frontier computer-use agent against them. The headline numbers: 1. Why build a computer-use benchmark for electrical engineering? Most computer-use benchmarks today live in the same handful of apps: web browsers, file managers, generic productivity suites. Those evaluations are useful, but they share a structural weakness —
June 11, 2026
Armin Parchami
,
Zhengyang (Jason) Qi
Image
The Art and Science of Building Benchmarks That Shape the Field
Vincent Sunn Chen spoke at AI Engineer London about what it actually takes to build benchmarks that move the field forward, not just measure it. The throughline is an asymmetry that keeps showing up across deployments and the 150+ proposals reviewed for the Open Benchmarks Grants: agent capabilities are climbing fast, but the ability to measure those agents in realistic,
June 8, 2026
Snorkel Team
the-fututre-of-coding-benchmarks
Benchtalks #2: The Future of Coding Benchmarks with John Yang (SWE-Bench, ProgramBench)
For our second Benchtalks, the series dedicated to the researchers building the measurement toolkits that frontier labs hill-climb on, Snorkel AI co-founder Vincent Sunn Chen sat down with John Yang, a Stanford PhD student and creator of the SWE-bench franchise, SWE-smith, CodeClash, and most recently ProgramBench. Highlights More on ProgramBench: See the benchmark and the upcoming leaderboard at programbench.com. More from John Yang: Publications and writing at john-b-yang.github.io. Snorkel
May 21, 2026
Vincent Sunn Chen
Image
Why Coding Agents Need Better Data, Evals, and Environments
Coding agents have moved from tab-complete to teammate. They autonomously inspect repositories, edit files, run commands, diagnose failures, and work through multi-step engineering tasks. That creates a harder reliability problem. A model that only suggests code is easy for a human to evaluate. A coding agent refactoring your repository and testing its own changes is much harder to supervise –
May 6, 2026
Justin Bauer
Image
Benchmarks should shape the frontier, not just measure it
Since launching the Open Benchmarks Grants, we’ve received more than 100 applications from academic groups and industry labs spanning a wide range of domains and capabilities. As the best benchmarks have driven how the field allocates research effort, the bar for what counts as useful has risen. Here, we share what’s now table stakes for useful benchmarks, and what separates
April 6, 2026
Vincent Sunn Chen
Image
Benchtalks #1: Alex Shaw (Terminal-Bench, Harbor) – Building the Benchmark Factory
To kick off our inaugural Benchtalks, a series dedicated to the researchers building these measurement toolkits, Snorkel AI co-founder Vincent Sunn Chen sat down with Alex Shaw, Founding MTS at Laude Institute and co-creator of Terminal-Bench and Harbor. Highlights More on Terminal-Bench: See the leaderboard and the catalog of tasks at tbench.ai. Explore Harbor: Learn how to scale your agent
March 31, 2026
Vincent Sunn Chen